Lotus fans: Show me the money or shut the hell up

If there is one thing I am absolutely sick to death of, it is the pathetic rantings of die-hard Lotus Notes fanboys about how technically superior their product is, and how everyone else who isn't drinking the IBM kool-aid are somehow "biased" and don't understand Notes' obvious superiority.

opinion

Let me walk you through an average day in these people's lives.

Courtesy of their Google Alerts set on key search terms like 'Lotus Notes' and 'Domino', when they slouch cringingly their Office Space-esque working environments just before 9AM every morning, they receive an annotated list of stories posted on global websites about how yet another mega-corporation has dumped Notes, typically in favour of the ultimate evil and hated destroyer of worlds, Microsoft Exchange.

Instantly, and despite the fact that this happens every day, the fingers of these Lotus Notes' fanboys tighten in terror around their 1980'²s IBM-branded coffee mug filled with weak herbal tea. Their throat seizes up as if they are having an asthma attack, and a series of short, disjuncted noises issue from their mouth as they gaze fixatedly at the screen, their beady eyes unable to look away from what they perceive as a horriffic event.

Then, setting the tea down shakily, these Lotus fanboys scrabble with gnarled fingers at the keyboard and mouse until they find the comments section of the website concerned. 'BIAS!!!' they scream. 'This journalist must be BIASED against Lotus! He's on the Microsoft payroll! Look at all the Microsoft advertisements on the site! It's a CONSPIRACY!'

They then proceed to outline in amazingly detailed prose the technical reasons why the Lotus Notes/Domino ecosystem is inherently better than Microsoft's Outlook/Exchange alternative. The extensibility of the platform. The number of third-party additions. Its easy upgrade path. The fact that you can now get it 'in the cloud' with Lotus Live. Its better security and integrated collaboration features.

And the list goes on.

Without fail, they punctuate their article with yet another, slightly more veiled jab at the journalist writing the article, before collapsing briefly into their chair as their anger dissipates and they raise their mug of herbal tea once again as a knight in the Crusades would have raised his sword, believing that they have righted all wrongs and put the world to harmony once more. 'I showed him,' they think, and start preparing the daily email to their chief executive justifying why their company's Lotus email system won't sync with his mobile phone.

FREE WHITEPAPER - RISKS OF MOVING DATABASES TO VMWARE

VMware changed the rules about the server resources required to keep a database responding

It's now more difficult for DBAs to see interaction between the database and server resources

This whitepaper highlights the key differences between performance management between physical and virtual servers, and maps out the five most common trouble spots when moving production databases to VMware